It’s all calm in Darwin, the shops are looking great with all the Christmas decorations. To think we could have been devastated by a cyclone. I decided to look in my encyclopedia to see what a cyclone is and here’s a brief explaination.

Cyclones are actually released stored energy that rotates. The sun heats up the ocean and creates the right conditions for a tropical cyclone to develop. Cyclones spin because the earth is spinning. It’s due to something called the coriolis effect. The direction they spin depends on which hemisphere they are in. When warm air rises rapidly the upward flow of air deflects the winds created by the Earth’s rotation creating a rotation around a core. This is called the ‘eye’. They can develop into intense cyclones especially when they hit land.